Unportable Code

Here is an email I received in response to my essay on how to write unmaintainable code.

Unportable Code : Todd X Zimnoch : toddx.zimnoch@intel.com : 2000-10-30

Among other things, I loved the Microsoft Minimalist Keyboard. I use Dvorak, much to the pain of anyone else who wants to use my computer and hasn’t been told to hit alt-shift to switch to ',.pyf.

I think you meant QWERTY.

Note on How to Write Unmaintainable Code: Camouflage #3: I think that in general, the \ in a #define ignores the next (white-space?) character. I tracked a bug in a program once to something like this.

#define init(x, s) char c##x = s; \ int x = 0;

x is a now a global variable. There was a space after the \. Maybe there were comments after the \ as well? I’m not certain if this is true for all compilers, though.

My favorite for unportable code:

struct foo {
int a;        // 2 or 4 bytes?
float b;        // 4 or 8 bytes?
};

fread(&bar, (sizeof) foo, 1, fp);

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